The devil double-parks

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day in Barcelona that heralded the coming of spring and the end of cold weather. So of couse I spent the whole afternoon cooped up indoors with a cold waching a film.

The thing about staying indoors at the weekend is that you notice something that isn’t quite so bad during weekdey evenings: street noise.

While eating lunch and listening to a CD, I found myself straining to hear the music. Perhaps I have become so accustomed to general background noise that at first it did not occur to me why I could not make out the song lyrics. But it soon dawned on me the source of the interruption was a repeated clang! clang! clang! from street level.

I wandered over to the balcony window and saw swarms of men trollying round large bottles of butano bottled gas. For non-locals I should point out that many people don’t have natural gas installed in their flats, and so they buy large bottles (as indeed I do) from sellers in the street. To alert people to their presence in the area, the sellers walk round banging a bottle with a spanner.

Eventually the clanging got fainter and fainter as the butano men dispersed into neighbouring streets. But still, they left something behind. With my immune system laid low by some kind of virus, my natrual defences to ambient noise had also been stripped away.

I sat down to watch the film while being increasingly aware of an entirely different sountrack: the chainsaw buzz of mopeds, the drone of traffic, the mechanical moaning of BCNeta cleaning and collecting rubbish, the occasional blair of a horn. I was getting more and more annoyed; not so much by the noise, but by my sudden inability to ignore it.

After a few hours I fell alseep, but was soon woken by a particularly incessant honking from right outside my window. It continued for around 15 minutes. Eventually I got up and went over to the window and saw what I expected: somebody blocked in by a double-parked van.

I feel sorry for people who get blocked in like this. It has happened to me, and you can do nothing but wait for the other driver to return. So I can understand the need to give the horn a blast or two to try and get the other guy to come back. But I can’t see the need to keep honking ad nausium: they can’t hear you but all the neighbours bloody well can!

So there’s a group of people standing around outside, leaning on the horn avaery 30 seconds and even shouting “hola?!”, “hola?!”… Soon, another car comes along trying to fit into a tiny gap, effectively triple parking. More cars now, turning the corner find their path blocked and traffic soons piles up: the inevitable happens. Now I have a whole wind section outside my window; loud, offbeat and offkey. My blood begins to boil.

I go out onto the balcony with the intention of simply raising awareness of us, hapless residents: “oye!” (”listen”) I want to shout, “keep it down, alright?”

Unfortunately what came out closer resembled the battle cry from Braveheart.

«Calleu!!»

Shut up!

Terrified by the force of my own voice, I scampered back insidoors and tremble in the bathroom; “hysterico!” someone shouts behind me.

So if you were one of the unfortunate people on the receiving end of this, I appologise. But it did make me feel a whole lot better, and my immunity has been resored. For now.

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